Share your portfolioas one clean link

PDF portfolios and case-study decks

A PDF is the safest format for a portfolio you send to hiring managers: it looks identical on every machine and won't reflow like a web page can. Export at a sensible resolution (large enough that mockups are crisp, small enough to stay under your plan's size limit), keep it to a landscape layout if it's a deck, and lead with your two strongest projects, many reviewers only open the first couple of pages. Your link shows the PDF in a clean in-browser viewer with page navigation, so nobody has to download anything to flip through your work. For a heavier book with lots of full-bleed imagery, watch the file size and compress images before exporting.

Image portfolios for photographers and illustrators

If your work is visual, sometimes the best portfolio is a single beautiful image, a hero shot, a stitched contact sheet, or a poster-style layout of your range. Upload a PNG or JPG and the link opens to the full image, scaled to fit whatever screen it lands on, with no compression from a chat app in the way. This is ideal for a quick 'here's my style' reply in a DM or an email, or a QR code on a print at a gallery or market stall. For a fuller set, a multi-page PDF or a bundled bucket keeps everything under one link instead of dumping ten separate files on someone.

HTML portfolios you built yourself

Built your own portfolio page with HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript? Upload the single self-contained .html file and it renders live behind your link, animations, custom fonts, and layout intact, inside a sandboxed frame, so it's a genuine web page and not a flat screenshot. This is the fastest way for a front-end developer or design-engineer to show craft without buying a domain or setting up hosting. Keep everything in one file (inline your CSS and JS, or reference assets by full URL) since only that one page is uploaded; anything that points at a missing local file won't load.

Looks right on the phone in a recruiter's hand

Most portfolio links are opened on a phone, during a commute, between meetings, in the ten seconds before someone decides whether to reply. Your link opens directly in whatever browser the viewer already has, with nothing to install and no 'download to view' friction that makes people bounce. That said, the browser shows your file as-is: a fixed-width HTML page or a wide landscape PDF can still feel cramped on a small screen. The fix is on your side, design responsively or export a portrait-friendly PDF, but the delivery itself never adds an app wall or a login between your work and the person reviewing it.

Update your work without changing the link

Your portfolio is never finished, you ship a new project, win an award, or want to swap a weak piece. Instead of re-uploading and pasting a new URL into every application and bio, you can replace the file behind an existing link and keep the same address. The résumé you sent last month, the QR on the business cards you already printed, the link in your LinkedIn intro, all now point at your latest work automatically. That makes a portfolio link something you set up once and quietly keep current, rather than a dead snapshot from whenever you last job-hunted.

See whether people are actually opening it

Every portfolio link carries a view counter, so you can tell the difference between 'nobody's looking' and 'they looked and passed'. If you sent your link to fifteen companies and the count barely moves, the problem is probably your outreach or where the link sits, not the work itself. On Pro, view analytics break opens down by device and country, useful for spotting when a specific application or a post finally got traction. It's honest, aggregate data: you see that opens happened and roughly from where, not who each individual viewer was.

Keep a client portfolio private when you need to

Sometimes a portfolio piece is under NDA, or you only want a specific studio to see certain client work. On Pro you can password-protect a link and share the password separately, set an expiry date so a link for one application quietly stops working later, or make it view-only to hide the download button. View-only is honest about its limits, it deters casual saving and keeps the emphasis on viewing in-browser, but it can't stop a determined viewer from screenshotting, so treat it as a nudge, not true DRM. For genuinely sensitive work, the password is the real gate.

Or host the whole site, not just a PDF

If your portfolio is a built website rather than a document, you do not have to flatten it. Static-site hosting is live here: upload a ZIP of your site, plain HTML and CSS, or the dist folder your framework produced, and it goes live on its own subdomain with automatic SSL, as a real multi-page site with working internal links.

For designers and front-end developers this is usually the better answer. A hosted site keeps your hover states, your type, your case-study navigation and your carefully chosen scroll, all the things a PDF export quietly destroys. And it is the same one-address story: put it on your CV, in your bio, on a card.

It is also the honest choice when your portfolio IS the code. A React or Vite build deployed as a static site demonstrates something a PDF of screenshots cannot.

PDF portfolio or hosted site, how to choose

Both work, and picking the wrong one costs you either polish or reach. The deciding question is not what you built, it is who is opening it and how.

One practical warning about the PDF route: export at screen resolution. A 90 MB portfolio PDF full of print-resolution images is a portfolio nobody on a phone ever finishes loading.

• Choose a PDF when the reader will skim it in an email, print it, or forward it to a colleague, and when the work is essentially flat, photography, illustration, architecture boards, a case-study deck. It renders identically everywhere and needs no maintenance.
• Choose a hosted site when the interaction is part of the work, when there is more of it than a document can hold, or when you want to keep editing it. Designers, front-end developers and anyone with more than about fifteen pages of material.
• Choose an image album when it is genuinely just pictures and you want them big, in order, with a link per piece so you can send a single image into a conversation.
• Do both when you are applying for jobs. A hosted site as the main link, and a two-page PDF for the application form that only accepts a file.